Economics and Politics in the Transformation of Italian Democracy Between the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Since the 1990s the model of Italian national governance has shifted repeatedly in terms of its composition and objectives, pulled between the competing logics of appealing to voters and satisfying the demands of international financial markets. Following the precipitous collapse of the "Republic of Parties,” Italy has alternated between traditional political governments guided by considerations of democratic representation, and technocratic executives tasked with ensuring emergency fiscal health. Longer-term economic factors, whose origins can be traced back to the 1960s, provide a structural explanation for these dramatic oscillations. As the mixed economy model came under increasing pressure from macroeconomic imbalances, Italian central bankers sought to insulate monetary policy from electoral winds. Within this context the progressively maturing European economic scaffold emerged simultaneously as an agent of technocratic emancipation and an external constraint on sovereign discretion, whose full implications for Italy and other debt-burdened countries would become appreciated only later on. This has produced a novel reality whereby national institutions are periodically called upon to act as constitutional enforcers of supranationally determined regulations. Such an arrangement of improvised pragmatism has thus far not spared Italy from becoming an epicentre of economic crises in Europe, during the eurozone crisis and again amidst Covid-19.